For a moment the moon-rays were obscured,--and a faint sigh from the wind stirred the long dry gra.s.s. A bat flew by, scurrying towards the Catacombs of Alexander,--a shadow lay upon the land. The combatants,--so singularly alike in form and feature,--stood rigidly in position, their weapons raised,--their only witnesses a cabman and a wanton, both creatures terrified out of their wits for themselves and their own safety. Swiftly the cloud pa.s.sed--and a brilliant silver glory was poured out on hill and plain and broken column,--and as it shone, the two shots were fired simultaneously--the two bullets whizzed through the air. A light puff of smoke rose in the moonbeams--it cleared--and Miraudin reeled backwards and fell heavily to the ground.
Fontenelle stood upright, but staggered a little,--instinctively putting his hand to his breast. Jeanne Richaud rushed to the side of her fallen lover.
"Victor! Victor!"
Miraudin struggled up to a half sitting position--the blood was welling up thickly from a wound in his lungs. Half suffocated as he was, he made a strong effort to speak, and succeeded.
"Not you--not you!" he gasped, "Do not touch me! Do not come near me!
Him!--him!" And he pointed to Fontenelle who still stood erect, swaying slightly to and fro with a dazed far-off look in his eyes--but now--as the frenzied soubrette beckoned him, he moved unsteadily to the side of his mortally wounded opponent, and there, through weakness, not emotion, dropped on his knees. Miraudin looked at him with staring filmy eyes.
"How I have hated you, Monsieur le Marquis!" he muttered thickly, "How I have hated you! Yes--as Cain hated Abel! For we--we are brothers as they were--born of the same father--ah! You start!" for Fontenelle uttered a gasping cry--"Yes--in spite of your pride, your lineage, your insolent air of superiority--YOUR father was MY father!--the late Marquis was no more satisfied with one wife than any of us are!--and had no higher code of honour! YOUR mother was a grande dame,--MINE was a "light o" love" like this feeble creature!" and he turned his glance for a moment on the shuddering, wailing Jeanne Richaud. "YOU were the legal Marquis--_I_ the illegal genius! . . . yes--genius--!"
He broke off, struggling for breath.
"Do you hear me?" he whispered thickly, "Do you hear?"
"I hear," answered Fontenelle, speaking with difficulty, "You have hated me, you say--hate me no more!--for hate is done with--and love also!--I am--dying!"
He grasped the rank gra.s.s with both hands in sudden agony, and his face grew livid. Miraudin turned himself on one arm.
"Dying! You, too! By Heaven! Then the Marquisate must perish! I should have fired in the air--but--but the sins of the fathers . . . what is it?" Here a ghastly smile pa.s.sed over his features, "The sins of the fathers--are visited on the children! What a merciful Deity it is, to make such an arrangement!--and the excellent fathers!--when all the children meet them--I wonder what they will have to say to each other I wonder . . ." A frightful shudder convulsed his body and he threw up his arms.
""Un peu d"amour, Et puis--bon soir!"
C"est ca! Bon soir, Marquis!"
A great sigh broke from his lips, through which the discoloured blood began to ooze slowly--he was dead. And Fontenelle, whose wound bled inwardly, turned himself wearily round to gaze on the rigid face upturned to the moon. His brother"s face! So like his own! He was not conscious himself of any great pain--he felt a dizzy languor and a drowsiness as of dreams--but he knew what the dreaming meant,--he knew that he would soon sleep to wake again--but where? He did not see that the woman who had professed to love Miraudin had already rushed away from his corpse in terror, and was entreating the cabman to drive her quickly from the scene of combat,--he realised nothing save the white moonbeams on the still face of the man who in G.o.d"s sight had been his brother. Fainter and still fainter grew his breath--but he felt near his heart for a little crumpled knot of filmy lace which he always carried--a delicate trifle which had fallen from one of Sylvie"s pretty evening gowns once, when he had caught her in his arms and sworn his pa.s.sion. He kissed it now, and inhaled its violet perfume--as he took it from his lips he saw that it was stained with blood. The heavy languor upon him grew heavier--and in the dark haze which began to float before his eyes he saw women"s faces, some beautiful, some devilish, yet all familiar,--he felt himself sinking--sinking into some deep abyss of shadows, so dark and dreary that he shuddered with the icy cold and horror, till Sylvie came, yes!--Sylvie"s soft eyes shone upon him, full of the pity and tenderness of some divine angel near G.o.d"s throne,--an angel of sweetness--an angel of forgiveness--ah!--so sweet she was, so childlike, so trusting, so fair, so enticing in those exquisite ways of hers which had pleaded with him, prayed to him, tried to draw him back from evil, and incite him to n.o.ble thought; "ways"
that would have persuaded him to cleanse his flag of honour from the mud of social vice and folly, and lift it to the heavens white and pure! Ah, sweet ways!--sweet voice!--sweet woman!--sweet possibilities of life now gone forever! Again that sinking,--that icy chill! His eyes were closing--yet he forced himself to open them as he sank back heavily on the turf, and then--then he saw the great white moon descending on him as it seemed, like a shield of silver flung down to crush him, by some angry G.o.d!
"Sylvie!--Sylvie!" he muttered, "I never knew--how much I loved you--till-now! Sylvie!"
His eyes closed--a little smile flickered on his mouth for a moment--and then the Shadow fell. And he lay stark and pallid in the moonlight, close to the brother he had never known till the last hour of life had revealed the bond of blood between them. Side by side they lay,--strangely alike in death,--men to whom the possibilities of n.o.ble living had been abundantly given, and who had wasted all their substance on vanity. For Victor Miraudin, despite his genius and the brilliancy of his art, was not likely to be longer remembered or mourned than the Marquis Fontenelle. The fame of the actor is even less than that of the great n.o.ble,--the actor"s name is but a bubble on the air which a breath disperses,--and the heir to a proud house is only remembered by the flattering inscription on his tombstone. Forgotten Caesars, greater than any living monarch, had mixed their bones with the soil where these two sons of one father lay dead,--the bright moon was their sanctuary lamp,--the stars their funeral torches,--the width of the Campagna their bier, and the heavens their pall. And when the two terrified witnesses of the fatal fight realised the position, and saw that both combatants had truly perished, there were no regrets, no lamentations, no prayers, no thought of going for a.s.sistance. With the one selfish idea uppermost,--that of escaping immediate trouble--Jeanne Richaud rallied her scattered wits, and dragging the praying and gesticulating cab-driver up from his knees, she bade him mount his box and drive her back to the city. Tremblingly he prepared to obey, but not without unfastening the horse which the dead Marquis had so lately ridden, and taking some trouble to attach it to his vehicle for his own uses.
"For if we do this, they will never know!" he muttered with chattering teeth, "A horse is always a horse--and this is a good animal, more valuable than the men;--and when they find the men that is none of our business. In--in with you, Madama! I will drive you into the city,--that is, if you give me a thousand francs instead of the five hundred your man promised me! Otherwise I will leave you here!"
"A thousand!" shrieked Richaud, "Oh, thief! You know I am a poor stranger--Oh, mon Dieu! Do not murder me!" This, as the driver, having hustled her into the vehicle and shut the door, now shook his dirty fist at her threateningly. "Oh!--what a night of horror! Yes--yes!--a thousand!--anything!--only take me back to Rome!"
Satisfied in his own mind that he had intimidated her sufficiently to make her give him whatever he demanded, the driver who, despite his native cupidity, was seriously alarmed for his own safety, hesitated no longer, and the noise of the dashing wheels and the galloping hoofs woke loud echoes from the road, and dull reverberations from the Ponte Nomentano, as the equipage, with two horses now instead of one, clattered out of sight. And then came silence,--the awful silence of the Campagna--a silence like no other silence in the world--brooding like darkness around the dead.
XXIV.
The next morning dawned with all the strange half mystical glow of light and colour common to the Italian sky,--flushes of pink warmed the gray clouds, and dazzling, opalescent lines of blue suggested the sun without declaring it,--and Sylvie Hermenstein, who had pa.s.sed a restless and wakeful night, rose early to go on one of what her society friends called her "eccentric" walks abroad, before the full life of the city was up and stirring. She, who seemed by her graceful mignonne fascinations and elegant toilettes, just a b.u.t.terfly of fashion and no more, was truly of a dreamy and poetic nature,--she had read very deeply, and the griefs and joys of humanity presented an ever-varying problem to her refined and penetrative mind. She was just now interesting herself in subjects which she had never studied so closely before,--and she was gradually arriving at the real secret of the highest duty of life,--that of serving and working for others without consideration for oneself. A great love was teaching her as only a great love can;--a love which she scarcely dared to admit to herself, but which nevertheless was beginning to lead her step by step, into that mysterious land, half light, half shadow, which is the nearest road to Heaven,--a land where we suffer gladly for another"s sorrow, and are joyous in our own griefs, because another is happy! To love ONE greatly, means to love ALL more purely,--and to find heart-room and sympathy for the many sorrows and perplexities of those who are not as uplifted as ourselves. For the true mission of the divine pa.s.sion in its divinest form, is that it should elevate and inspire the soul, bringing it to the n.o.blest issues, and for this it must be a.s.sociated with respect, as well as pa.s.sion. No true soul can love what it does not sincerely feel to be worthy of love. And Sylvie--the brilliant little caressable Sylvie, whose warm heart had been so long unsatisfied, was, if not yet crowned by the full benediction of love, still gratefully aware of the wonderful colour and interest which had suddenly come into her life with the friendship of Aubrey Leigh. His conversation, so different to the "small talk" of the ordinary man, not only charmed her mind, but strengthened and tempered it,--his thoughtful and tender personal courtesy filled her with that serenity which is always the result of perfect manner,--his high and pure ideas of life moved her to admiration and homage,--and when she managed to possess herself of every book he had written, and had read page after page, sentence after sentence, of the glowing, fervent, pa.s.sionate language, in which he denounced shams and glorified truth,--the firmness and fearlessness with which he condemned religious hypocrisy, and lifted pure Christianity to the topmost pinnacle of any faith ever known or accepted in the world, her feelings for him, while gaining fresh warmth, grew deeper and more serious, merging into reverence as well as submission. She had a book of his with her as a companion to her walk this very morning, and as she entered the Pamphili woods, where she had a special "permesso" to go whenever she chose, and trod the mossy paths, where the morning sun struck golden shafts between the dark ilex-boughs, as though pointing to the thousands of violets that blossomed in the gra.s.s beneath, she opened it at a page containing these lines:--
"Who is it that dares a.s.sert that his life or his thoughts are his own?
No man"s life is his own! It is given to him in charge to use for the benefit of others,--and if he does not so use it, it is often taken from him when he least expects it. "THOU FOOL, THIS NIGHT THY LIFE SHALL BE REQUIRED OF THEE!" No man"s thoughts even, are his own. They are the radiations of the Infinite Mind of G.o.d which pa.s.s through every living atom. The beggar may have the same thought as the Prime Minister,--he only lacks the power of expression. The more helpless and inept the beggar, the greater the responsibility of the Premier. For the Premier has received education, culture, training, and the choice of the people, and to him is given the privilege of voicing the beggar"s thought. And not only the beggar"s thought, but the thoughts of all in the nation who have neither the skill nor the force to speak.
If he does not do what he is thus elected to do, he is but an inefficient master of affairs. And what shall we say of the ministers of Religion who are "ordained" to voice the Message of Christ? To echo the Divine!--to repeat the grand Ethics of Life,--the Law of Love and Charity and Forbearance and Pity and Forgiveness! When one of these highly destined servants of the Great King fails in his duty,--when he cannot pardon the sinner,--when he looks churlishly upon a child, or condemns the innocent amus.e.m.e.nts of the young and happy,--when he makes the sweet Sabbath a day of penance instead of praise--of tyranny instead of rest,--when he has no charity for backsliders, no sympathy for the sorrowful, no toleration for the contradictors of his own particular theory--do we not feel that his very existence is a blasphemy, and his preaching a presumption!"
Here Sylvie raised her eyes from the book. She was near an ancient cedar-tree whose dark spreading boughs, glistening with the early morning dew, sparkled like a jewelled canopy in the sun,--at her feet the turf was brown and bare, but a little beyond at the turn of the pathway, a cl.u.s.ter of white narcissi waved their graceful stems to the light wind. There was a rustic bench close by, and she sat down to rest and think. Very sweet thoughts were hers,--such thoughts as sweet women cherish when they dream of Love. Often the dream vanishes before realisation, but this does not make the time of dreaming less precious or less fair. Lost in a reverie which in its pleasantness brought a smile to her lips, she did not hear a stealthy footstep on the gra.s.s behind her, or feel a pair of dark eyes watching her furtively from between the cedar-boughs,--and she started with surprise, and something of offence also, as Monsigner Gherardi suddenly appeared and addressed her,--
"Buon giorno, Contessa!"
She rose from her seat and saluted him in silence, instinctively grasping the book she held a little closer. But Gherardi"s quick glance had already perceived the t.i.tle and the name of its author.
"You improve the time!" he said, sarcastically, pacing slowly beside her. "To one of your faith and devotion that book should be accursed!"
She raised her clear eyes and looked at him straightly,
"Is the sunlight accursed?" she said, "The gra.s.s or the flowers? The thoughts in this book are as pure and beautiful as they!"
Gherardi smiled. The enthusiasm of a woman"s unspoilt nature was always a source of amus.e.m.e.nt to him.
"Your sentiments are very pretty and poetic!" he said, "But they are exaggerated. That book is on the "Index"!"
"Yes, of course it would be!" answered Sylvie quietly, "I have often wondered why so much fine literature is condemned by the Church,--and do you know, it occurred to me the other day that if our Lord had WRITTEN what He said in the form of a book, it might be placed on the "Index" also?"
Gherardi lifted his eyes from their scrutiny of the ground, and fixed them upon her with a look of amazement that was almost a menace. But she was not in the least intimidated,--and her face, though pale as the narcissi she had just seen in blossom, was very tranquil.
"Are you the Comtesse Hermenstein?" said Gherardi then, after an impressive pause, "The faithful, gentle daughter of Holy Church? or are you some perverted spirit wearing her semblance?"
Sylvie laughed.
"If I am a perverted spirit you ought to be able to exorcise me, Monsignor!" she said,--"With the incense of early Ma.s.s clinging to you, and the holy water still fresh on your hands, you have only to say, "Retro me Sathanas!" and if I am NOT Sylvie Hermenstein I shall melt into thin air, leaving nothing but the odour of sulphur behind me! But if I AM Sylvie Hermenstein, I shall remain invincible and immovable,--both in myself and in my opinions!"
Gherardi controlled his rising irritation, and was silent for some minutes, reflecting within himself that if the fair Countess had suddenly turned restive and wayward, it was probably because she was falling in love with the author whose works she defended, and taking this into consideration, he judged it would be wisest to temporise.
"Invincible you always are!" he said in softer tones, "As many unhappy men in Europe can testify!"
"Are you among them?" queried Sylvie mischievously, the light of laughter beginning to twinkle and flash in her pretty eyes.
"Of course!" answered Gherardi suavely, though his heart beat thickly, and the secret admiration he had always felt for the delicate beauty of this woman who was so utterly out of his reach, made his blood burn with mingled rage and pa.s.sion. "Even a poor priest is not exempt from temptation!"
Sylvie hummed a little tune under her breath, and looked up at the sky.
"It will be a lovely day!" she said--"There will be no rain!"
"Is that the most interesting thing you can say to me?" queried Gherardi.
"The weather is always interesting," she replied, "And it is such a safe subject of conversation!"
"Then you are afraid of dangerous subjects?"
"Oh no, not at all! But I dislike quarrelling,--and I am afraid I should get very angry if you were to say anything more against the book I am reading"--here she paused a moment, and then added steadily, "or its author!"
"I am aware that he is a great friend of yours," said Gherardi gently, "And I a.s.sure you, Contessa--seriously I a.s.sure you, I should be the last person in the world to say anything against him. Indeed, there is nothing to say, beyond the fact that he is, according to our religion, a heretic--but he is a brilliant and intellectual heretic,--WELL WORTH REDEEMING!" He emphasised the words, and shot a meaning glance at her; but she did not appear to take his hint or fathom his intention. She walked on steadily, her eyes downcast,--her tiny feet, shod in charming little French walking shoes, peeping in and out with a flash of steel on their embroidered points, from under the mysterious gleam of silk flounces that gave a soft "swish," as she moved,--her golden hair escaping in one or two silky waves from under a picturesque black hat, fastened on by velvet ribbons, which were tied in a captivating knot under the sweetest of little white chins, a chin whose firm contour almost contradicted the sensitive lines of the kissable mouth above it.
A curious, dull sense of anger teased the astute brain of Domenico Gherardi, as with all the dignified deportment of the stately churchman, he walked on by her side. What was all his scheming worth, he began to think, if this slight feminine creature proved herself more than a match for him? The utmost he could do with his life and ambitions was to sway the ignorant, cram his coffers with gold, and purchase a change of mistresses for his villa at Frascati. But love,--real love, from any human creature alive he never had won, and knew he never should win. Sylvie Hermenstein was richer far than he,--she had not only wealth and a great position, but the joys of a natural existence, and of a perfect home-life were not denied to her.
Presently, seeing that they were approaching the gates of exit from the Pamphili, he said,--